Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 64527 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 323(@200wpm)___ 258(@250wpm)___ 215(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64527 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 323(@200wpm)___ 258(@250wpm)___ 215(@300wpm)
He’d asked for my phone before he’d gone into town, making sure to take out the SIM card and destroying that before destroying the phone itself. By the end, it’d looked like he’d put it in the food processor. Honestly, I didn’t hate the idea. I would’ve given anything that kept Alex from being able to call me, but the downside was that now my mom also had no way of contacting me.
Now, the knowledge that the only ways I had of getting in touch with my mom were in his hands made me feel a little bit cagey. I just hated the idea of being beholden to him for anything more than I already owed him; it was distressing.
He looked up at me, a little sadly. “That’s not a great idea. We still don’t know exactly how he’s been able to find you. It might’ve been through her phone records.”
I sighed, huffing heavily through my nose as I stared him down. He had a good point, but that didn’t change the fact that I was disappointed by it. Or by his high-handedness.
I was quiet as he continued to move around the kitchen, chopping all of the onions and carrots for the base of the soup and pouring olive oil into a deep pot that he put on the stove. I watched him move with such confidence through the kitchen and processed how measured each of his actions were, putting together more clues about him as I went.
“Was your uncle the one who taught you how to cook?”
He snorted as he continued with his chopping. “Hell no. That man basically lived on canned beans and hot dogs. He’d have raised me on them too.”
That was an interesting choice of words, and like any trained therapist, I honed in on it.
“So, someone else taught you how to cook?”
His eyes flicked up to me, fixing hard on my face for a second before looking back down at his preparation of the food. “Yeah. A friend.”
Jesus. It was harder to get information out of this man than squeezing water out of a rock. “That must’ve been an interesting arrangement. Was it someone that you went to after school or something?”
He gave me a small nod and a smile and tossed the veggies into the pot. They made a satisfying sizzle as they hit the bottom of the pot, and he started moving the onions around so that they cooked evenly.
I decided to try a different track. “Why a police officer?”
His face snapped up to me at that, and his eyes hardened to chips of green glass in an expression that had probably petrified numerous suspects in the past. “Why an art therapist?”
“I asked first,” I said, crossing my arms and feeling like I was finally getting somewhere with this frustrating, impossible, gorgeous man. That intimidating face did nothing to quell my need to know more; all it did was throw fuel on it.
He held my gaze in silence.
I sighed. “I became an art therapist because of an art therapist. When my mom left my dad, I was… well, I was a shithead. A nightmare kid. My mom tried taking me to three different therapists before one of them put a pad of paper in front of me, and I spent the rest of the session drawing.” I laughed a little at the thought. “I never went back to that guy, but the next week, my mom took me to another woman, and things actually started to get better.”
“But you went to art school, right?”
I had, and I’d told him so, but I’d already told him a lot, and the balance of power between us was starting to feel dangerously out of order. I leaned over so that I met his eyes fully, holding his stare with all of its intensity. “Answer my question first. Why a cop?”
He finally looked away from me, turning away from me and grabbing a canister of lentils from a cabinet above the coffeemaker.
Sometimes, all people needed to know was that people were interested, and that there was someone who cared. Since he and I were stuck together for the foreseeable future, it wouldn’t do any good for me to shut him out and pretend that I wasn’t curious about him.
“Is it because of your parents? Did something happen to them?”
I saw his hand freeze and spasm a little. Bingo.
“Were they the perps or the victims?”
The cabinet door slammed shut, and he brought his hand down on the counter with so much force that I almost jumped. I waited for him to start yelling at me to mind my own business, that I was a nosy bitch, anything… but he didn’t say a word.
I knew the question had been a risky one, but I was trying anything I knew how to try to get him to open up to me. The tactic had failed miserably.